newspapers

Headline writing, of the clever, punning variety that is their stock in trade, is fast becoming an anachronism. For the role of subeditors is changing as media organisations do as the Sun has done and establish integrated newsrooms; producing papers, website, blogs and broadcasts from one desk.

Tuesday I'm in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, to lead a daylong "citizen journalism" training workshop. Undoubtedly the meltdown at the Plain Dealer will be one of the topics of conversation. Noteworthy links:

Over the last five or six years we've seen a tremendous shift in power from destination sites to search. Google has been the big winner. In general, newspaper websites have been slow to recognize the implications of this shift, and have adjusted poorly to the new realities.

In the last 24 months a new contender has arisen: social networking sites, which are so "sticky" that they're displacing everybody else, even Google. And again, newspaper sites are slow to recognize the implications.

How thin can a newspaper staff be? MediaNews is looking for an editor who may find out. Clyde Davis, who blogs about free newspapers, points to a job posting for Flash, a "daily commuter tabloid" planned for Salt Lake. The editor will supervise a staff of four.

I'm generally a big fan of the Poynter Institute and I often quote Roy Peter Clark, but not in the case of "Your Duty to Read the Paper," in which the great writing coach transforms himself right before our eyes into an Internet troll.

He says journalists should read more newspapers because they have a duty to do so.

Alan "Newsosaur" Mutter is one of my faves, and his brain drain post was a classic even before the comments started rolling in.

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.